Dawn - Mindful Eating For Dummies

Part IV

• Adopt mindful eating in your home and family environment: practicing mindful eating with your family, especially children, helps encourage everyone to eat with more awareness and sets a good example for building a healthy and balanced relationship with food.
• Discover how to navigate mindful eating in social outings that revolve around food: we all know that most social situations these days include food. These situations also offer lots in the way of distractions, making it more challenging to be present with the act of eating.
• Use mindful eating to work with food cravings: for many people, food cravings are no laughing matter and can have the power to cause pain and hardship in ones life. Mindful eating is a very helpful tool to deal with cravings when they arise.
• Use mindfulness to help you overcome setbacks: Chapter contains some great tools to help you get back on track if your eating habits take a turn in a direction that youre not so thrilled about.
• Apply mindful eating to help reverse emotional eating habits: emotions are a part of the human experience and often food and eating can become enmeshed in a wide range of emotional experiences.

Get information on starting a mindful eating group to share your experiences and get support from others at www.dummies.com/extras/mindfuleating .

In this part

• Find out how to apply mindful eating within the context of your everyday life.
• Explore mindful eating with your family and children.
• Discover how to navigate social situations that revolve around food more mindfully.
• Apply mindfulness during challenging social situations, such as eating in restaurants, during the holidays and whilst travelling.
• Find time for mindful eating within a busy schedule.
• Mindfully work with food cravings.
• Mindfully explore emotional hunger and your emotional triggers to eat.

Part III

• Strengthen the direct line of communication with your inner body awareness: a whole universe exists within you and after you start to explore that and keep a direct line of open communication between body and mind, youre guided towards what and how much to eat. But you need to listen and pay attention to receive the message!
• Discover how to do a quick body scan before you eat: this can help you receive the valuable information that your body has to offer you. Chapter has a guided body-scan practice for you.
• Get into the habit of slowing down: its harder to pay attention when youre rushing around. Slowing down is a practice that is conducive to fostering mindfulness.
• Approach food with curiosity and playfulness: You can play many different games and exercises to practice and explore mindful eating. Adopt a beginners mind and have fun with them!
• Explore food with the full range of your senses: the act of eating has much to offer you in the way of pleasurable sensory experience, but only if youre present enough to experience it.

Find four simple ways to get started with mindful eating at www.dummies.com/extras/mindfuleating .

In this part

• Dive into exploring the many different practical applications of mindfulness before, during and after you eat.
• Understand how to practice the body scan and use the hunger-fullness scale to support mindful inner-body awareness.
• Discover how to slow down, press the mute button and give thanks.
• Find out how to mindfully explore the full range of your senses while you eat.

Part II

• Explore the flip-side to mindfulness: by understanding how your mind is preoccupied with being everywhere else but right here, you can start catching your mindless moments and train your mind to be present with your experience.
• Start noticing your triggers: practice paying attention to whats triggering you to eat when youre not actually hungry. See if you can pay more attention to those triggers and how your knee-jerk-reactions are prompting you to act.
• Set realistic expectations and identify your goals: understand how mindfulness can help you reach your health goals and write down what goals youd like to achieve.
• Cultivate a supportive attitude that fosters mindfulness: examine some of these attitudes, including acceptance, non-judgment, curiosity and self-compassion.
• Practice mindfulness while choosing what to eat and during meal preparation: mindfulness isnt only about paying attention while you eat, it can also help you decide what to eat and help you to stay present while youre making those foods into a delicious meal.

Get more information on recognizing the characteristics between mindfulness and mindlessness and how to apply them to eating mindfully at www.dummies.com/extras/mindfuleating .

In this part

• You have the opportunity to build a solid foundation by understanding the flipside to the mindful eating coin: mindlessness. You discover why youre geared towards automatic pilot and the difference between mindfulness and mindlessness.
• Explore how to find a middle-way approach to eating and how to achieve your health goals with mindful eating.
• Find out how to cultivate a supportive mindful eating mindset and how to grow the right attitudes to help you on this journey.
• Discover how to choose foods more mindfully and apply the power of mindfulness to the preparation of meals.

Part I

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In this part

• You are introduced to mindful eating and its roots in the practice of mindfulness.
• You find out about the many ways that people eat mindlessly and how mindfulness can help prevent some of the negative consequences of eating without paying attention.
• You identify how mindful eating can help you as you discover the wonderful benefits that mindfulness and mindful eating have to offer.